Susan Granger’s review of “The Bread, My Sweet” (Panorama Entertainment)
This unexpectedly perceptive romantic fable captures the evocative emotions of an Italian-American immigrant family coping with catastrophes and changes. After Lucca (Kristin Minter), their beloved only daughter, joined the Peace Corps to explore the world, cheery, nurturing Bella (Rosemary Prinz) and cantankerous Massimo (John Seitz) befriended an amiable, ambitious young man named Dominic (Scott Baio) and his two brothers: amorous Eddie (Billy Mott) and mentally-retarded Pino (Shuler Hensley). “Three years ago, I don’t know your name,” Bella marvels to Dominic. “Now, you are my son.” They run a bakery on the ground floor of Bella’s building in the quaint Strip district of Pittsburgh. But with his MBA, Dominic also has another career. He’s a financially successful corporate raider whose distasteful job is to fire the executives and employees of the companies his firm has acquired. Then a crisis on the homefront occurs. Dominic discovers that Bella has cancer – and he knows that the only way that the elderly woman will die happy is if he can find he wayward, wandering Lucca and marry her. After all, for years, Bella has been stuffing coffee cans with cash to spend on Lucca’s wedding. “I do deals,” Dominic explains, “and there’s a very small window of opportunity here.” The convincing performances and realistic dialogue allow you to suspend disbelief as the simplistic yet sincere ethnic story unfolds. In that way, writer/director Melissa Martin cleverly draws you into an improbably contrived courtship that’s rife with deception. So, despite a cloying, often intrusive soundtrack, on the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Bread, My Sweet” is a corny but charming 6. It satisfies – like a “My Big Fat Italian Breading.”
